


Nature morte aux oranges

by brigantines



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Sex, Cloaca, Egg Laying, Eggs, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Oviposition, Prostate Milking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:04:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9375737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: Hunk and Shay, some fluff and some definitely not fluff.  Ch. 2 is a SFW version, if that's your preference.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for Blue on plurk who requested xeno, because there's been a lot of Hunk/Shay in the background of other fics, and not nearly enough alien sex.

The human boy that wears the armor of the Yellow Paladin is a quick, hot thing. His body radiates heat like the warmth of the stones in the deep places; his blood rushes audibly to her sensitive ears. The drum of his pulse is so, so loud. His smooth, dark, sun-dweller skin is soft and thin, worryingly so, vulnerable to the slightest catch of horn and claw. Sensitive, where her hide is tough and spiked, armor plated. Made to endure. She had not realized at the time, overawed by the fairytale shock of a Voltron paladin appearing in her small, unremarkable life, but she is startled again every day to see that she is taller than him, even when she hunches down in deference, her armored shoulders broader, her muscles forged by years of hard labor and necessity down in the darkness. It cannot be what he is accustomed to, in his own species. His clawless hands are engulfed by hers, and she is shy of it, at first, of her own strength compared to his, easily lifting a fallen support girder that three of the paladins had struggled to move, but he is as fascinated by her as she is of a species without claws to dig tunnels and eyes to see in the dark. 

He has to look up to meet her eyes. His blunt, strange fingers are hot and quick on her hide, curious around the ridges of her armored plates and delving between them. He describes it in delight as the feel of soft leather, not hard and tough at all, but supple like snakeskin, or the vulnerable joints of a turtle. He explains what that means.

He doesn’t understand what she means, when he comes to visit her in the quiet dawn dimness and finds her perched atop a low rocky cairn at the mouth of the cave, so silent and motionless as to be thought part of the stones, and she tells him shyly that that’s the point of it, that she is practicing seeking stillness. “You have to be taught to hold still?” he asks, uncertain, that familiar wavering expression on his mobile human face when he doubts the translation. 

Like stone, she tells him patiently, trailing her claws along the wall of the cave tunnel, the hard armored plates of their mother Balmera. The stone is not her flesh. The rocks and boulders are accumulations, the outer scales, and when they tremble and come loose it is the same as Shay shedding her horns.

All of Shay’s race learn to seek stillness. To become like stone is to honor their mother. To breathe slower and slower, to quiet their pumping blood and organs until they can hear the soft, pervasive rhythms of the planet-creature they inhabit, until they can hear the resonance among living crystals. The Balmera’s voice is in that resonance. She sings to herself and to her children, and to the ocean of the cosmos around them as she drifts, weightless and immense, trailing stardust behind her. They all move too quickly to hear her song. Life is quick and hot and oblivious. Careless. Stillness has to be learned, sought after. 

Shay goes every day to practice, making her way to the barren caverns and the empty fields that used to hold the vast expanses of the crystal gardens. She settles herself down on the bare, gouged rock and pretends that she is surrounded by endless stretches of carefully tended, carefully shaped crystal flowerings, their polished blue-green surfaces glowing softly, pulsing with life. 

(The Galra had raided the surface gardens long before Shay was ever hatched. She can only see them in her mind, stitched together from the words of older captives and the images of smaller, protected caverns that were not discovered so quickly, still lush with tender, reaching crystal spikes. The surface, she is afraid, may never produce healthy gardens again.) 

She explains that the elders of her race sometimes go down to the deep places when they decide they would like to become still forever. They choose a place of resting and the stones and crystals grow up around them, encompassing them, cradling them as they were once cradled in the shell. She tells him that it used to be an honor for a master gardener to become part of a last creation shaped naturally by their mother Balmera. 

Her human boy looks anxious at that. She understands; to species like his, stillness is a sign of death or disease. His body was built to move quickly, to produce noise, to live hotly. To stop moving is to accept a permanent stillness. The Galra were the same. They prohibited the practice in their workers, using prods and whips to keep them in motion. They attached shock collars that would register how long an individual had gone without moving. They learned how much pain it took to overcome the desire to remain still. 

She doesn’t tell her human boy about that, although perhaps he guesses, from the way his strange colored eyes linger on the callouses and indentations of her hide, on the places where the steel muzzle had been strapped to her head. He is gentle with her in a way that seems utterly foreign to the life she’s known. He talks about the sky because it pleases her, he asks after the Balmera as if he truly is concerned for her injuries, he asks about the cultivation of crystals. He is interested in everything she says, though she is not an elder or a master of any trade. She is only herself, a slave miner, and luckier than most who came out of those dark, cramped caverns with all their hope stripped away, the same way that Galra had stripped the living crystals from their mother Balmera’s body.

He doesn’t like to talk about death, or what the Galra are capable of. The Paladins of Voltron are described as great warriors in the songs and half-remembered legends but also as protectors, as guardians of life. He is even a little bit horrified by the great monster encased in crystal after she tells him that their mother Balmera will definitely recover with such a meal, and with the assistance of the Altean princess. 

Shay has seen a lot of death. It had been normal for her, ordinary and every day. The mines were holes bored into the bones of their mother Balmera to suck out her marrow, to kill the limb. Workers died in the mines. Rebellions died. Galra soldiers died. Hatchlings had been taken from their parents as part of population redistributions, and poor, innocent eggs had been destroyed. Worse, Shay had seen dams keening in the lower caverns, burying their unborn eggs deep in the bedrock to let them become crystallized, to spare them from the lives they would have had. Sacrificing them, perhaps, to keep the Balmera alive. Their distant ancestors had done so, a long time ago. 

Shay and Rax are the only two remaining out of a clutch of five. Her brothers went to a mine on the far side of the mountains. Her sister struck a Galra soldier. Her grandsire escaped supervision in the mines and tried to go down to the deep places when Shay was still very young, but he was caught and brought back, beaten, silent. The Galra preferred their slaves to work until they dropped in their traces. The mines became boneyards, but the crystals would not grow in those dark, corrupted pits. The Balmera knew. The Balmera suffered with her children.

Rax used to shake her awake every night when they were hatchlings, hungry and shivering in their damp hollow near the dwindling fire, afraid that Shay would become still during the night and forget to wake up. He was too quick and too angry to want to learn, and terrified that Shay would leave him behind one day. Rax is still resentful with the outsiders and finds excuses to interrupt Shay’s work, pushing his face into business that is not his own. 

“You let him follow you like a lost hatchling,” he complains to her. “What is it he wants?”

What her human boy wants is to cook meals for her family. He asks shyly about traditional ingredients, and then swiftly decides that her granddam’s grub stew is beyond him. Shay admits that its best seasoning was always grueling labor and gnawing hunger, and he declares that he’ll make something brand new for her, something without any bad associations. He brings her lunches as she works on the relocation effort, sculpting stones and digging dirt for new homes, foraging supplies from the wreckage of Galra installations. Her people can’t go back to the dangerous, half-collapsed mines, the gaping wounds of their mother, and the few scattered buildings on the surface are unclean Galra constructions that the Balmera will shake to pieces once she is well. After so many years underground the light of the sun overhead is uncomfortable, so the Voltron paladins offer their services scouting for shallow cave networks that were never used for mining. They have promised to help. 

At day’s end they eat the rations that the Galra had laid in store for their workers. They’re tasteless and bland, but there are a lot of mouths to feed and few options. There aren’t many complaints; they get better portions now that the guards aren’t around to punish them or ‘forget’ to bring the food. 

The paladins sit down to eat with them, even the princess and her advisor, although they would have better fare on their ship. The Blue, Green, and Red Paladins make faces when they think no one is looking and push their tiny portions around, clearly waiting for the moment to bolt back to their headquarters and find something more appetizing, but her human boy does not. He frowns thoughtfully at the gloopy stuff, and pesters Shay and her brother and her dam and sire and granddam and everyone else that will speak to him for information on what Balmerans eat.

The Black Paladin sits with them but does not eat. He tried, the first time; he was very adamant about wanting all of them to eat the same food while they are here and helping, but the moment the tray settled in front of him all the color left his face, and Shay could hear his heart begin to pound like a creature on the edge of battle. He takes only water at day’s end, now, though he works twice as hard as any of them, and the Red Paladin sits too close, guarding him like a nestmate, snapping at the others. Shay remembers Rax doing the same when their dam grew sick and weak and the Galra rations would not settle in her belly; she remembers foraging desperately for anything they could make into a meal, even stealing from the guards, who ate much better than their workforce. 

Her human boy brings her things to taste. Root vegetables, dried spices, strange things in strange, brightly colored containers, determined to learn her palate, determined to make the rations better or find some substitute out of the flora and fauna the Balmera still supports. She likes sweet things, but not the same sweet things that he likes. He describes the edible plants that grow on his planet while she listens raptly, imagining lush, steamy jungles and brightly colored fruits that grow so profusely they bow the branches with their weight. Yellow fruits, orange fruits, brown, tough fruits with hairy tendrils that have to be cut open or pounded apart. He talks about cheeseburgers, which are stacks of bread and meat and thin, solid sheets of animal milk and sometimes vegetables and sauces, and what he would do for one at any given moment. He describes spam musubi and poi and movie butter popcorn, which is not the same as ordinary popcorn, and also not quite the same as corn.

She shows him the growing caves and the sheltered green places of the mountains-- the last sanctuaries of plants and small animals that had survived the Galra invasions, where there are still roots to dig and leaves to harvest, small rodents to trap, mosses and lichens and fungus to collect. The shallow inland seas have dried nearly to nothing, their water pumped away to service machinery, but there are crustaceans and pale, blind fish as thick as her torso in the mineral rich waters of the deeper caves, and they are easy to catch, even with bare hands, if one knows how to be still. 

They go down into the river caverns where the walls sweat condensation and the air is muggy and heavy, clinging to her hide, and she leads him into the running, blood-warm waters where the fish come to feed. He holds the woven basket ready, sunk to his waist in the current, and she holds her arms out like an offering, making herself a statue. The eyeless fish bump curiously around her legs and arms. She can hear the tiny noises they make as they come to the surface for air, little bubbling pops, but they do not hear her breathing in return, because she is stone. She is cool and heavy and inanimate as the current parts around her. Their belly scales slide fearlessly over her hands.

She hooks two of them with her claws and heaves their thrashing, wiggling bodies into the wide mouth of the basket while he yells in delight, dripping wet and beaming in the close dimness of the cave. The fish nearly knock him down with their struggles; another pair and they will feed a dozen families. Their flesh will go into clay pots, their bones and heads will simmer into stock, their offal will bait traps for scavengers. 

He wraps his arms around one scaly, slippery body and lifts it up out of the water for her to see, grinning, struggling under the weight that she lifted easily, and she is struck by something fast and hard between her lungs, a hot, quick, squirmy feeling that brims in her when he tells her that she’s an amazing fish whisperer, that she’s just amazing. The heat of the cavern makes his dark skin flush deeper and his damp hair dry into fluffy, messy curls. The rushing of the water in her ears does not drown out the thunder of his heart. When she goes back to the water, it takes her a long time to become still again.

They make a stew with grains and vegetables, shells and stock, and bring it to a boil in the largest cauldron they can find, stretching out the flavor with all the tricks they know, and when they serve it at day’s end nobody goes away hungry. 

He tells her about his planet’s oceans, about the beaches, about cookouts and barbecue pits on the sand. She describes the cooking pits from feast days her granddam told her about, encasing meat and vegetables in clay skins and burying them from sunrise to sunset to roast over heated stones. That, he says happily, he can recreate, even if they don’t have any banana leaves or pork. He wants to do that for her people, he wants the paladins to bring that back. The Galra took their customs and their traditions. The paladins should be about more than just fighting battles in space, reclaiming territory. He doesn’t want to leave until Shay and her family have a place to live and food to eat. 

(The other paladins mumble about time-tables, but their princess is still weak from her exertions, and the Black Paladin that commands them was very quick to support the idea of helping out the reconstruction. Shay has seen him before on the broadcast screens of the Galra guards. He looks smaller when he is not covered in blood, and he carries himself like he is injured somewhere deep inside. His eyes find the whip marks on her shoulders, the calluses of shackles and collar before they find her face, and she can see that he doesn’t know what to say to her. When a small party is quietly organized to cremate the bodies of the remaining Galra soldiers, he appears out of the shadows with a torch, wordless and haunted. None of the others were told about the clean up. He stays all night to watch the corpses burn.) 

Shay hammers stone under the shade of the great Yellow Lion while her human boy designs a water purification system, sketching it out in the sand and making notes on his datapad. His lion likes the hot sun and the hot sand and the red rock formations around them, apparently, because she refuses to go back into the shelter of the castle ship. Shay enjoys a mobile sunshade that is also capable of digging out collapsed tunnels and ferrying loads of quarried stone. 

Her human boy likes building. He likes designing. He likes coming up with solutions to feed hundreds of lean, hungry workers from the salvaged Galra stores and the deep maze of the castle ship’s supply rooms and the ingredients they can forage. The Altean princess has negotiated an agreement with a neutral kingdom; the Balmera will be brought through a wormhole to a different galaxy where she can heal and replenish herself in safety, and the local alliance of planets will defend her and supply her population. Balmeran crystals are so badly wanted that Shay’s people will be able to barter outrageously for anything they desire. 

Already there are crystals growing off the body of the great Galra beast, tentative spikes jutting and unfurling that need pruning, shaping, tending. In a generation, perhaps, the beast will be unrecognizable, absorbed, and there will be only a monument of crystal rearing high over fields of glowing flowerets. Shay goes at night when the light does not hurt her eyes and assists the eldest gardeners, learning from them. She has already promised one day to give the princess and her paladins the largest, most exquisite crystal she can cultivate, a jewel worthy of a battlestation or the palace of a capital city. 

Her human boy waits for her at the edge of the unexpected garden, respectful. He admonishes his lion and the other paladins to tread lightly on the Balmera’s back, and he touches the crystals with genuine wonder. He brings her a tiny flat stick of something called ‘gum’ that is not really a food but a toy, meant to be chewed and played with but not swallowed, a peppermint candy that lingers on her tongue like a piece of ice, a thin, wrapped bar of delicious ‘chocolate,’ and a white, sweet, wobbling jelly-brick of something that she devours before he even has time to apologize for the changes he had to make in the recipe. 

These are tiny, precious mementos of his homeworld, she understands. Everything he shares with her is one less taste, one less flavor that he has for himself to keep the memory alive. She’s not sure she deserves the gifts, but she understands the uncertainty that he’s living with. He may fall in battle against the Galra before he sees his home again. He may fall in battle before he can put together the special, brand new recipe that he wants to cook for her, the meal that is supposed to be free of any bad associations. He’s cooked fish for her, vegetables, grains, he’s brought her dozens of experimental meals that he’s turned into large scale productions for the rest of the refugees, but he isn’t satisfied with any of them. It should be above and beyond, he insists. It should be perfect, even when she protests that she wouldn’t recognize perfect if it tapped her on the shoulder. 

His improvised earth ovens feed her people. The Red and Blue Lions give him fire and ice when he needs them, their paladins good-natured about the ridiculousness of using divine super weapons to freeze a fish or fire an earth brick. Supplies are running thin without the regular Galra shipments coming in, but the Balmera will be moving soon to her new home. Soon they won’t have to ration or fly to the most remote regions to forage. 

Shay brings him to a tiny, unmolested cave she discovered, its low black ceiling covered with the smallest glowing buds of infant crystals like miniature stars. If they lay down very still together the crystals will hum softly, resonating. They flicker like reflections of embers. Shay makes herself still and quiet and the baby crystals latch on to the rhythm of his heartbeat instead, pulsing in time. They will remember his pattern for the rest of their long lives. She doesn’t tell him that. She also doesn’t tell him that she plans to come back to the cave on her own and make herself silent, so she can listen to that particular rhythm. The stones will hold an imprint of his body. She will smooth them down, hollow them ever so faintly. She will carve the evidence that he was here into the rock and hoard it for herself, selfishly.

She’s invited aboard the castle ship on the day of the move, to visit the command deck, the hangar, the galley, the baths. She feels out of place amidst the polished white lines of Altean architecture, but the Balmeran crystal breathing in the heart of the ship is healthy and vibrant. The other paladins seem eager to chatter about the planets they’ve seen, the adventures they’ve had, and Shay feels that hot squirming again; she would like to see the skies they talk about. She would like to see the sunrises and sunsets. 

A healthy Balmera travels through the galaxy at her own will. She does not stay in one place forever. Her children will see different constellations and live under the light of different suns. Under Galra rule, their mother Balmera had been too weak to move, too weak to escape. When the wormhole opens to bring the Balmera through to her new galaxy, Shay is in the cockpit of the Yellow Lion, watching the stars unfold. It’s unspeakably beautiful. A new yellow sun pours its light over the Balmera’s scarred flesh for the first time, and the supply ships from the Torjian kingdom land quickly, laden with food and textiles and tools. No one will sleep cold or hungry or wanting. 

There is a celebration on the surface, but Shay lets her human boy lead her into the quiet shadows of the castle ship’s winding hallways to the soft, messy lair where he lives. He ran out of grand cooking ideas, he says, and closes his soft-skinned hands around hers, making her palms a cradle for a bright, wedge-shaped slice of fruit. He didn’t know what to do with it: a cake, or a drink, or baked into a bread, or sliced raw in a salad, or a sauce for a meat. The last Earth orange in space, he says, nibbling on his own section, trying to sound like he’s making a joke.

It is not a joke. She understands very well that there is every possibility he will never see another one. She touches his face gently, as she has seen the Red Paladin do for the Black Paladin when he stood like this, with his eyes downcast and shoulders taut. 

Her human boy looks up at the touch, perhaps surprised, and smiles for her, the movement of his lips no longer foreign. He smiles all the time, for his fellow paladins, for her people, for the princess. This is a different kind of smile. 

They are standing close together. The castle hums quietly around them, drawing energy from the living heart of Balmeran crystal in its core. 

She can’t help a tiny gasp when she bites into the piece of fruit, the flavor bursting on her unprepared tongue. The flesh is soft and pulpy, succulent. It has survived all this time in the cold dark of space, away from its home, but it is still beautifully ripe, beautifully juicy, sweet and tangy and different from anything she’s ever put into her mouth before. It doesn’t need cooking; it tastes wonderful all on its own. 

The flavor of it clings to his mouth when she kisses him, clumsily, as she has seen humans kiss. The other paladins think they are discreet, but their eyes don’t learn to look for stillness. Shay has seen this done, and more. She has asked, shyly, in confidence, for permission from the princess, who must be a stand-in for their dam when the paladins are all so far away from their families.

He is surprised, but not that surprised. He’s been thinking about this, maybe as much as she has, and he flushes hotly when she tells him so. His tongue is shorter than hers, a lovely, dusky pink. It moves over the nubs on her tongue, gently exploring, trading the taste of the orange back and forth between them. She licks a long stripe of salty skin, tasting him, and he laughs shakily. His blood rushes, and so does hers. His curious, exploring fingers find the soft places under her armor.

Come on, he whispers, and leads her to the castle baths. With the lights out the only breaks in the warm, close darkness come from the scattered glowing tiles at the bottom of the hot, steaming, shallow pools, and the walls and ceiling can be made transparent with a single Altean command, filled with wheeling stars. The rising mist off the water reminds her of the fishing caves. The twin moons soaring above them are new, and beautiful, and she thinks of floating in orbit above the Balmera in the cockpit of the Yellow Lion, looking at her home laid out on the blackness of space like a flowering jewel. 

She explores the soft, strange planes of his soft, strange body, mindful of her claws and the rough rasp of her hide. The water carries their weight and hides the noise of their breathing. She has never felt so far from stillness. He twitches helplessly under her claws, her tongue, under the rough kneading of her mouth. He slides a hand between her thighs, questing, until she presses his fingers to the slit of her cloaca and he rubs her there, teasing and tender, cupping the shape of her bulge beneath her butter-soft hide until she shudders and bucks in his hands. His fingers are inside her, coated wet, skimming ever so gently over her sensitive walls, over the soft throbbing head of her sheathed ovipositor. It slides free into his waiting hands and she trembles in pleasure.

He tastes her. He bends his head and worships her, his tongue reverent on the ridges and globes of her. He puts her into his hot, soft mouth and she groans, tormented, her claws raking him gently. She pulls his hips around, manhandling him easily while he yelps in surprise, and she presses her horns into the vulnerable soft places between his legs, below his rigid sex organ. She makes him groan when her tongue finds an opening there, a little furl of muscle that clenches and winks shyly, and he makes a punched-out, desperate noise she’s never heard before when her tongue wriggles inside, exploring eagerly. This is where her eggs will go. Her instincts whisper to make him fat and full. 

He sucks her desperately, his head bobbing in time with the rhythm of her tongue as she pushes it in and out of him, preparing the way for something larger. The blunt knobs tease his quivering walls and he gasps once, wet and choked, when she unwittingly scrapes across some place of pleasure inside him. Her swelling ovipositor slips free of his mouth and he comes in messy pulses over her belly, his sex organ twitching and pulsing. The seed that splatters her hide is strange and hot and she can’t resist dragging the pads of her fingers through it to learn its texture and then its taste, humming thoughtfully. She cups his slowly softening penis in the palm of her hand and, after a minute, begins to rub it. Human males can mate multiple times, she has learned.

It’s unsafe for her to use her fingers on him, not without gloves or some other protection from her claws, so he has to do that part for himself while she gently, carefully tugs his cock, whispering into his small, shell-shaped ear about the mating rituals between her people. Giving gifts of food is an ancient tradition. Building a fine nest. Presenting oneself as a responsible and considerate adult, worthy of rearing a clutch. In her species, the sires carry the fertilized eggs until the shells have hardened long enough for them to survive outside in the elements, where they will incubate in a nest built of soft earth and carefully heated rocks. 

Like seahorses, he murmurs, and promises to sketch pictures for her later. He is languorous after orgasm, his eyes heavy-lidded, his muscles unwound. She would let him sleep if he said the word, she would carry him out of the water, but he wants to do this for her. With her. He wants to cater to her needs.

Shay has never given her eggs to a male before. So many didn’t, or couldn’t, during their enslavement. There was not enough food, not enough warmth. It is just as well that she has no plans to bring the few eggs inside her now to term; they would be small and stunted. 

Its resistance weakened by their combined efforts, the small opening between his legs loosens quickly when she breaches him, the tapered head of her ovipositor smooth and slick-wet for the purpose. She spurts inside him immediately, jetting a huge stream of nutrient rich slurry into his passage, slicking him, pressing him open for the eggs to follow. He moans underneath her and his hips push back without prompting, impaling himself further. His walls cling and rub against the ridges of her ovipositor as she presses in deeply, rocking back and forth to pleasure him. He opens, and opens, and opens, taking her in, until her hips are flush against the meat of his rear, her claws gripping him firmly. His head hangs low and his thighs tremble and she can hear the frenzied wet sounds of him working his cock. If she were more practiced she would like to do that for him, but all her concentration is on the tight, melting heat squeezing her, milking her. 

Her orgasm crests in a slow, rolling wave as she moves in him, pushing deeper. Muscles contract and flex and she can feel the first egg drop, pleasure coursing through her as she squeezes it through the flexible shaft. She grunts softly as it hits the ring of muscle, his muscle, constricting her, and they cry out together when she pushes the egg through, stretching him, moving huge and unyielding inside him. 

She pushes another egg into him, and another, crooning low and soft. He claws the wet tile mindlessly, his back arching for her, and comes with a strangled shout, hot white seed spattering the floor beneath him as his shaking arms give out. She catches him and eases him down, slipping loose from his body as he squirms over onto his back, his thighs splayed wide around her hips, his expression dazed and satiated. One of his hands rests unconsciously on his stomach, pressing in gently. 

A real clutch would be much larger, would take longer, but this is only for pleasure. She guides him to a shallow soaking pool where the water is refreshed constantly and sits behind him, bracketing him, washing the sweat from his skin and nuzzling gently into the fine, soft hair at the nape of his neck. The clean up is slow and lingering, intimate, maybe moreso than their joining, their fingers laced together, him moaning weakly every time an egg moves across that sensitive spot inside him. He comes one final time under her hands, his cock too weak to rise but the seeds still pearling up out of the little slit like a tiny, gasping mouth, drawn away by the warm water. The eggs, unfertilized, inert, sink to the shallow bottom. 

Still, she thinks, and does not say so. Maybe someday they won’t be, and anyway she doesn’t want to be still, or think about stillness now. She leans back against the slope of the wall and listens to the rush of her human boy’s heartbeat, slowing now, looking up at the galaxies spinning out above them. 

“I’m gonna make you that dinner someday,” he mumbles, settling back comfortably against her larger frame. “I’m gonna-- gonna find some space soil the orange seeds will grow in. I’ll make you a seven course Victorian dinner, all oranges, fancy enough for the Ritz.”

She doesn’t know what that means, but it makes her feel warm to hear. “I’d like that,” she says.


	2. Nature morte aux oranges (SFW version)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A SFW version of the same story, if explicit xeno isn't your thing.

The human boy that wears the armor of the Yellow Paladin is a quick, hot thing. His body radiates heat like the warmth of the stones in the deep places; his blood rushes audibly to her sensitive ears. The drum of his pulse is so, so loud. His smooth, dark, sun-dweller skin is soft and thin, worryingly so, vulnerable to the slightest catch of horn and claw. Sensitive, where her hide is tough and spiked, armor plated. Made to endure. She had not realized at the time, overawed by the fairytale shock of a Voltron paladin appearing in her small, unremarkable life, but she is startled again every day to see that she is taller than him, even when she hunches down in deference, her armored shoulders broader, her muscles forged by years of hard labor and necessity down in the darkness. It cannot be what he is accustomed to, in his own species. His clawless hands are engulfed by hers, and she is shy of it, at first, of her own strength compared to his, easily lifting a fallen support girder that three of the paladins had struggled to move, but he is as fascinated by her as she is of a species without claws to dig tunnels and eyes to see in the dark. 

He has to look up to meet her eyes. His blunt, strange fingers are hot and quick on her hide, curious around the ridges of her armored plates and delving between them. He describes it in delight as the feel of soft leather, not hard and tough at all, but supple like snakeskin, or the vulnerable joints of a turtle. He explains what that means.

He doesn’t understand what she means, when he comes to visit her in the quiet dawn dimness and finds her perched atop a low rocky cairn at the mouth of the cave, so silent and motionless as to be thought part of the stones, and she tells him shyly that that’s the point of it, that she is practicing seeking stillness. “You have to be taught to hold still?” he asks, uncertain, that familiar wavering expression on his mobile human face when he doubts the translation. 

Like stone, she tells him patiently, trailing her claws along the wall of the cave tunnel, the hard armored plates of their mother Balmera. The stone is not her flesh. The rocks and boulders are accumulations, the outer scales, and when they tremble and come loose it is the same as Shay shedding her horns.

All of Shay’s race learn to seek stillness. To become like stone is to honor their mother. To breathe slower and slower, to quiet their pumping blood and organs until they can hear the soft, pervasive rhythms of the planet-creature they inhabit, until they can hear the resonance among living crystals. The Balmera’s voice is in that resonance. She sings to herself and to her children, and to the ocean of the cosmos around them as she drifts, weightless and immense, trailing stardust behind her. They all move too quickly to hear her song. Life is quick and hot and oblivious. Careless. Stillness has to be learned, sought after. 

Shay goes every day to practice, making her way to the barren caverns and the empty fields that used to hold the vast expanses of the crystal gardens. She settles herself down on the bare, gouged rock and pretends that she is surrounded by endless stretches of carefully tended, carefully shaped crystal flowerings, their polished blue-green surfaces glowing softly, pulsing with life. 

(The Galra had raided the surface gardens long before Shay was ever hatched. She can only see them in her mind, stitched together from the words of older captives and the images of smaller, protected caverns that were not discovered so quickly, still lush with tender, reaching crystal spikes. The surface, she is afraid, may never produce healthy gardens again.) 

She explains that the elders of her race sometimes go down to the deep places when they decide they would like to become still forever. They choose a place of resting and the stones and crystals grow up around them, encompassing them, cradling them as they were once cradled in the shell. She tells him that it used to be an honor for a master gardener to become part of a last creation shaped naturally by their mother Balmera. 

Her human boy looks anxious at that. She understands; to species like his, stillness is a sign of death or disease. His body was built to move quickly, to produce noise, to live hotly. To stop moving is to accept a permanent stillness. The Galra were the same. They prohibited the practice in their workers, using prods and whips to keep them in motion. They attached shock collars that would register how long an individual had gone without moving. They learned how much pain it took to overcome the desire to remain still. 

She doesn’t tell her human boy about that, although perhaps he guesses, from the way his strange colored eyes linger on the callouses and indentations of her hide, on the places where the steel muzzle had been strapped to her head. He is gentle with her in a way that seems utterly foreign to the life she’s known. He talks about the sky because it pleases her, he asks after the Balmera as if he truly is concerned for her injuries, he asks about the cultivation of crystals. He is interested in everything she says, though she is not an elder or a master of any trade. She is only herself, a slave miner, and luckier than most who came out of those dark, cramped caverns with all their hope stripped away, the same way that Galra had stripped the living crystals from their mother Balmera’s body.

He doesn’t like to talk about death, or what the Galra are capable of. The Paladins of Voltron are described as great warriors in the songs and half-remembered legends but also as protectors, as guardians of life. He is even a little bit horrified by the great monster encased in crystal after she tells him that their mother Balmera will definitely recover with such a meal, and with the assistance of the Altean princess. 

Shay has seen a lot of death. It had been normal for her, ordinary and every day. The mines were holes bored into the bones of their mother Balmera to suck out her marrow, to kill the limb. Workers died in the mines. Rebellions died. Galra soldiers died. Hatchlings had been taken from their parents as part of population redistributions, and poor, innocent eggs had been destroyed. Worse, Shay had seen dams keening in the lower caverns, burying their unborn eggs deep in the bedrock to let them become crystallized, to spare them from the lives they would have had. Sacrificing them, perhaps, to keep the Balmera alive. Their distant ancestors had done so, a long time ago. 

Shay and Rax are the only two remaining out of a clutch of five. Her brothers went to a mine on the far side of the mountains. Her sister struck a Galra soldier. Her grandsire escaped supervision in the mines and tried to go down to the deep places when Shay was still very young, but he was caught and brought back, beaten, silent. The Galra preferred their slaves to work until they dropped in their traces. The mines became boneyards, but the crystals would not grow in those dark, corrupted pits. The Balmera knew. The Balmera suffered with her children.

Rax used to shake her awake every night when they were hatchlings, hungry and shivering in their damp hollow near the dwindling fire, afraid that Shay would become still during the night and forget to wake up. He was too quick and too angry to want to learn, and terrified that Shay would leave him behind one day. Rax is still resentful with the outsiders and finds excuses to interrupt Shay’s work, pushing his face into business that is not his own. 

“You let him follow you like a lost hatchling,” he complains to her. “What is it he wants?”

What her human boy wants is to cook meals for her family. He asks shyly about traditional ingredients, and then swiftly decides that her granddam’s grub stew is beyond him. Shay admits that its best seasoning was always grueling labor and gnawing hunger, and he declares that he’ll make something brand new for her, something without any bad associations. He brings her lunches as she works on the relocation effort, sculpting stones and digging dirt for new homes, foraging supplies from the wreckage of Galra installations. Her people can’t go back to the dangerous, half-collapsed mines, the gaping wounds of their mother, and the few scattered buildings on the surface are unclean Galra constructions that the Balmera will shake to pieces once she is well. After so many years underground the light of the sun overhead is uncomfortable, so the Voltron paladins offer their services scouting for shallow cave networks that were never used for mining. They have promised to help. 

At day’s end they eat the rations that the Galra had laid in store for their workers. They’re tasteless and bland, but there are a lot of mouths to feed and few options. There aren’t many complaints; they get better portions now that the guards aren’t around to punish them or ‘forget’ to bring the food. 

The paladins sit down to eat with them, even the princess and her advisor, although they would have better fare on their ship. The Blue, Green, and Red Paladins make faces when they think no one is looking and push their tiny portions around, clearly waiting for the moment to bolt back to their headquarters and find something more appetizing, but her human boy does not. He frowns thoughtfully at the gloopy stuff, and pesters Shay and her brother and her dam and sire and granddam and everyone else that will speak to him for information on what Balmerans eat.

The Black Paladin sits with them but does not eat. He tried, the first time; he was very adamant about wanting all of them to eat the same food while they are here and helping, but the moment the tray settled in front of him all the color left his face, and Shay could hear his heart begin to pound like a creature on the edge of battle. He takes only water at day’s end, now, though he works twice as hard as any of them, and the Red Paladin sits too close, guarding him like a nestmate, snapping at the others. Shay remembers Rax doing the same when their dam grew sick and weak and the Galra rations would not settle in her belly; she remembers foraging desperately for anything they could make into a meal, even stealing from the guards, who ate much better than their workforce. 

Her human boy brings her things to taste. Root vegetables, dried spices, strange things in strange, brightly colored containers, determined to learn her palate, determined to make the rations better or find some substitute out of the flora and fauna the Balmera still supports. She likes sweet things, but not the same sweet things that he likes. He describes the edible plants that grow on his planet while she listens raptly, imagining lush, steamy jungles and brightly colored fruits that grow so profusely they bow the branches with their weight. Yellow fruits, orange fruits, brown, tough fruits with hairy tendrils that have to be cut open or pounded apart. He talks about cheeseburgers, which are stacks of bread and meat and thin, solid sheets of animal milk and sometimes vegetables and sauces, and what he would do for one at any given moment. He describes spam musubi and poi and movie butter popcorn, which is not the same as ordinary popcorn, and also not quite the same as corn.

She shows him the growing caves and the sheltered green places of the mountains-- the last sanctuaries of plants and small animals that had survived the Galra invasions, where there are still roots to dig and leaves to harvest, small rodents to trap, mosses and lichens and fungus to collect. The shallow inland seas have dried nearly to nothing, their water pumped away to service machinery, but there are crustaceans and pale, blind fish as thick as her torso in the mineral rich waters of the deeper caves, and they are easy to catch, even with bare hands, if one knows how to be still. 

They go down into the river caverns where the walls sweat condensation and the air is muggy and heavy, clinging to her hide, and she leads him into the running, blood-warm waters where the fish come to feed. He holds the woven basket ready, sunk to his waist in the current, and she holds her arms out like an offering, making herself a statue. The eyeless fish bump curiously around her legs and arms. She can hear the tiny noises they make as they come to the surface for air, little bubbling pops, but they do not hear her breathing in return, because she is stone. She is cool and heavy and inanimate as the current parts around her. Their belly scales slide fearlessly over her hands.

She hooks two of them with her claws and heaves their thrashing, wiggling bodies into the wide mouth of the basket while he yells in delight, dripping wet and beaming in the close dimness of the cave. The fish nearly knock him down with their struggles; another pair and they will feed a dozen families. Their flesh will go into clay pots, their bones and heads will simmer into stock, their offal will bait traps for scavengers. 

He wraps his arms around one scaly, slippery body and lifts it up out of the water for her to see, grinning, struggling under the weight that she lifted easily, and she is struck by something fast and hard between her lungs, a hot, quick, squirmy feeling that brims in her when he tells her that she’s an amazing fish whisperer, that she’s just amazing. The heat of the cavern makes his dark skin flush deeper and his damp hair dry into fluffy, messy curls. The rushing of the water in her ears does not drown out the thunder of his heart. When she goes back to the water, it takes her a long time to become still again.

They make a stew with grains and vegetables, shells and stock, and bring it to a boil in the largest cauldron they can find, stretching out the flavor with all the tricks they know, and when they serve it at day’s end nobody goes away hungry. 

He tells her about his planet’s oceans, about the beaches, about cookouts and barbecue pits on the sand. She describes the cooking pits from feast days her granddam told her about, encasing meat and vegetables in clay skins and burying them from sunrise to sunset to roast over heated stones. That, he says happily, he can recreate, even if they don’t have any banana leaves or pork. He wants to do that for her people, he wants the paladins to bring that back. The Galra took their customs and their traditions. The paladins should be about more than just fighting battles in space, reclaiming territory. He doesn’t want to leave until Shay and her family have a place to live and food to eat. 

(The other paladins mumble about time-tables, but their princess is still weak from her exertions, and the Black Paladin that commands them was very quick to support the idea of helping out the reconstruction. Shay has seen him before on the broadcast screens of the Galra guards. He looks smaller when he is not covered in blood, and he carries himself like he is injured somewhere deep inside. His eyes find the whip marks on her shoulders, the calluses of shackles and collar before they find her face, and she can see that he doesn’t know what to say to her. When a small party is quietly organized to cremate the bodies of the remaining Galra soldiers, he appears out of the shadows with a torch, wordless and haunted. None of the others were told about the clean up. He stays all night to watch the corpses burn.) 

Shay hammers stone under the shade of the great Yellow Lion while her human boy designs a water purification system, sketching it out in the sand and making notes on his datapad. His lion likes the hot sun and the hot sand and the red rock formations around them, apparently, because she refuses to go back into the shelter of the castle ship. Shay enjoys a mobile sunshade that is also capable of digging out collapsed tunnels and ferrying loads of quarried stone. 

Her human boy likes building. He likes designing. He likes coming up with solutions to feed hundreds of lean, hungry workers from the salvaged Galra stores and the deep maze of the castle ship’s supply rooms and the ingredients they can forage. The Altean princess has negotiated an agreement with a neutral kingdom; the Balmera will be brought through a wormhole to a different galaxy where she can heal and replenish herself in safety, and the local alliance of planets will defend her and supply her population. Balmeran crystals are so badly wanted that Shay’s people will be able to barter outrageously for anything they desire. 

Already there are crystals growing off the body of the great Galra beast, tentative spikes jutting and unfurling that need pruning, shaping, tending. In a generation, perhaps, the beast will be unrecognizable, absorbed, and there will be only a monument of crystal rearing high over fields of glowing flowerets. Shay goes at night when the light does not hurt her eyes and assists the eldest gardeners, learning from them. She has already promised one day to give the princess and her paladins the largest, most exquisite crystal she can cultivate, a jewel worthy of a battlestation or the palace of a capital city. 

Her human boy waits for her at the edge of the unexpected garden, respectful. He admonishes his lion and the other paladins to tread lightly on the Balmera’s back, and he touches the crystals with genuine wonder. He brings her a tiny flat stick of something called ‘gum’ that is not really a food but a toy, meant to be chewed and played with but not swallowed, a peppermint candy that lingers on her tongue like a piece of ice, a thin, wrapped bar of delicious ‘chocolate,’ and a white, sweet, wobbling jelly-brick of something that she devours before he even has time to apologize for the changes he had to make in the recipe. 

These are tiny, precious mementos of his homeworld, she understands. Everything he shares with her is one less taste, one less flavor that he has for himself to keep the memory alive. She’s not sure she deserves the gifts, but she understands the uncertainty that he’s living with. He may fall in battle against the Galra before he sees his home again. He may fall in battle before he can put together the special, brand new recipe that he wants to cook for her, the meal that is supposed to be free of any bad associations. He’s cooked fish for her, vegetables, grains, he’s brought her dozens of experimental meals that he’s turned into large scale productions for the rest of the refugees, but he isn’t satisfied with any of them. It should be above and beyond, he insists. It should be perfect, even when she protests that she wouldn’t recognize perfect if it tapped her on the shoulder. 

His improvised earth ovens feed her people. The Red and Blue Lions give him fire and ice when he needs them, their paladins good-natured about the ridiculousness of using divine super weapons to freeze a fish or fire an earth brick. Supplies are running thin without the regular Galra shipments coming in, but the Balmera will be moving soon to her new home. Soon they won’t have to ration or fly to the most remote regions to forage. 

Shay brings him to a tiny, unmolested cave she discovered, its low black ceiling covered with the smallest glowing buds of infant crystals like miniature stars. If they lay down very still together the crystals will hum softly, resonating. They flicker like reflections of embers. Shay makes herself still and quiet and the baby crystals latch on to the rhythm of his heartbeat instead, pulsing in time. They will remember his pattern for the rest of their long lives. She doesn’t tell him that. She also doesn’t tell him that she plans to come back to the cave on her own and make herself silent, so she can listen to that particular rhythm. The stones will hold an imprint of his body. She will smooth them down, hollow them ever so faintly. She will carve the evidence that he was here into the rock and hoard it for herself, selfishly.

She’s invited aboard the castle ship on the day of the move, to visit the command deck, the hangar, the galley, the baths. She feels out of place amidst the polished white lines of Altean architecture, but the Balmeran crystal breathing in the heart of the ship is healthy and vibrant. The other paladins seem eager to chatter about the planets they’ve seen, the adventures they’ve had, and Shay feels that hot squirming again; she would like to see the skies they talk about. She would like to see the sunrises and sunsets. 

A healthy Balmera travels through the galaxy at her own will. She does not stay in one place forever. Her children will see different constellations and live under the light of different suns. Under Galra rule, their mother Balmera had been too weak to move, too weak to escape. When the wormhole opens to bring the Balmera through to her new galaxy, Shay is in the cockpit of the Yellow Lion, watching the stars unfold. It’s unspeakably beautiful. A new yellow sun pours its light over the Balmera’s scarred flesh for the first time, and the supply ships from the Torjian kingdom land quickly, laden with food and textiles and tools. No one will sleep cold or hungry or wanting. 

There is a celebration on the surface, but Shay lets her human boy lead her into the quiet shadows of the castle ship’s winding hallways to the soft, messy lair where he lives. He ran out of grand cooking ideas, he says, and closes his soft-skinned hands around hers, making her palms a cradle for a bright, wedge-shaped slice of fruit. He didn’t know what to do with it: a cake, or a drink, or baked into a bread, or sliced raw in a salad, or a sauce for a meat. The last Earth orange in space, he says, nibbling on his own section, trying to sound like he’s making a joke.

It is not a joke. She understands very well that there is every possibility he will never see another one. She touches his face gently, as she has seen the Red Paladin do for the Black Paladin when he stood like this, with his eyes downcast and shoulders taut. 

Her human boy looks up at the touch, perhaps surprised, and smiles for her, the movement of his lips no longer foreign. He smiles all the time, for his fellow paladins, for her people, for the princess. This is a different kind of smile. 

They are standing close together. The castle hums quietly around them, drawing energy from the living heart of Balmeran crystal in its core. 

She can’t help a tiny gasp when she bites into the piece of fruit, the flavor bursting on her unprepared tongue. The flesh is soft and pulpy, succulent. It has survived all this time in the cold dark of space, away from its home, but it is still beautifully ripe, beautifully juicy, sweet and tangy and different from anything she’s ever put into her mouth before. It doesn’t need cooking; it tastes wonderful all on its own. 

The flavor of it clings to his mouth when she kisses him, clumsily, as she has seen humans kiss. The other paladins think they are discreet, but their eyes don’t learn to look for stillness. 

“I like it,” she says, and kisses him again to prove it. “I think it’s perfect.”

**Author's Note:**

> MERRY CHRISTMAS i'm sorry it's so late


End file.
